What's New: November 2023

Checkout - Support for Barclays ePDQ payments

Our latest payment gateway addition to Checkout is Barclays ePDQ!

Barclaycard ePDQ (Electronic Payment Data Quality) is an online payment processing solution provided by Barclays.

When Barclays ePDQ is set up within your platform, it will appear as a Payment Type option in the payment step of your Checkout basket.

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The integration with Barclays in Checkout is a redirect integration. This means that when they click to make a payment through your Checkout basket, your customers are directed to a secure Barclays page to enter their card information.

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Your customer is then directed back to the accessplanit Checkout basket when their payment is processed.

If you are already using Barclays ePDQ to take payments through your accessplanit shopping basket, you can continue to use the same Barclays account when you transition to the new accessplanit Checkout basket. Please read through our dedicated guide for Barclays ePDQ to update your back-office settings to configure your Barclays account correctly for Checkout use.

Checkout - Support for partial payments/deposits

It is now possible to allow your customers to make deposits for their Courses through your Checkout basket, instead of paying the full balance upfront.

This feature can be a valuable tool to boost bookings, especially for high-value courses, as it allows your customers to spread their payments and reduces their upfront financial commitment!

Your customers can then make further payments via their portal! Alternatively, most payment gateways allow your administrator team to process payments for your customers over the phone via the Make Payment option.

To offer partial payments on your Courses, scroll down to the Financial section when editing your Course and provide a partial payment amount. This can either be a fixed amount, for example £80, or it can be a percentage amount, for example 50% of the course cost.

If you cannot currently see these partial payment options, please get in touch with a member of the accessplanit team to enable them for you!

Custom Fields - Store custom information about your Resources

Your accessplanit platform is built to be configurable to support a wide range of processes and ways of working, and Custom Fields play a big role in this.

Using Custom Fields, you can capture extra information to support your business processes!

You can decide what your Custom Fields are called, where they are located, and whether they should be a text box, a date selector, a drop-down box, or a number!

Custom Fields can then be included in your DataGrids, your Workflows, reports, and on your Dashboards to make sure your information is accessible to your full team.

You can already add your own Custom Fields into your accessplanit platform for Users, Accounts, Course Templates, Courses, Invoices, and Bookings and now, we have expanded the Custom Field options to also cover Resources!

Resource-based Custom Fields are not only available for you to include and filter-on within your Resources DataGrid:

• You will also be able to access all Trainer and Venue Custom Fields within the Trainer and Venue API Feeds

• You will also be able to import data to your Trainer and Venue Custom Fields via the built-in platform Import Tool

• You will also be able to filter your Resources by your Custom Fields when you are choosing which Trainer/Venue/Resource to use on a Course

Here are examples of the type of information you can store within Custom Fields about Trainers and Venues, to then use to select the best Resource for each course you offer!

Trainers

• Highest Qualification Level
  Store your trainers' highest academic degree or professional certifications

• Areas of Expertise
  List the subjects or topics each trainer specialises in

• Teaching Experience
  Record the number of years each trainer has been teaching

• Training Formats
  Store whether your trainers are available to lead classroom courses, webinar courses, or both!

• Feedback / avg ratings
  Store your trainers' average rating from your customer feedback

• Languages Spoken
  If you run courses in a variety of languages, store the languages each trainer can deliver in

• Training Style
  Store your trainers' approach to teaching (such as; authoritative, delegative, facilitator, demonstrator)

Venues

• Room Layout
  Store the layout of each training room (such as; classroom-style, theater-style, U-shaped, boardroom, etc.)

• Facilities and Amenities
  List available facilities such as audio-visual equipment, whiteboards, projectors, and Wi-Fi access

• Accessibility
  While your accessplanit platform already has a standard field for recording if your venues have disabled access, you may wish to report on other relevant accessibility features

• Parking
  Store information about on-site or nearby parking options

• On/Off Campus
  Define whether each venue is on or off campus
  
  

Credit Notes - View which Invoices each Credit Note has been used on

You can now quickly view the details of the Invoices your Credit Notes have been linked to from your Credit Notes DataGrid!

To add this to your Credit Notes DataGrid, click on the ‘Change Columns’ button at the top-right of your DataGrid.

Click a ‘+' button to add a new Column in, and use the drop-down box of your new column to select the 'Linked Invoice’ option.

The Invoice References that are included in the 'Linked Invoice' DataGrid column are dynamic! This means that you can click on them to have a shortcut through to view the Invoice, and manage it in the Invoices DataGrid!

Price Schemes - Update to price lookup on Class & Web Courses

In this release, there is an update to the way that Price Schemes are looked-up when they are applied to Bookings & Invoices.

Price Schemes are used to define fixed, alternative costs on your Courses for specific customers. These costs override the standard cost of the Course! This makes Price Schemes great for scenarios where Discounts are not suitable, or you have a contracted price with a customer for a Course that you offer.

When a Classroom or Webinar Course Template has a Price Scheme assigned to it and then a Course is scheduled, the Price Scheme (like many other settings) is automatically inherited by the Course. You can then, per Course, make changes to this Price Scheme.

Before this release, if you chose to delete the Price Scheme from the Course and only offer the standard cost, then the booking and invoicing process would see that the Course no longer had the Price Scheme, however it would instead look to the Course Template and use the Price Scheme stored there. This means that Price Schemes were still being applied to bookings, even if they had been deleted from the Course that was booked.

Following this release, if you delete a Price Scheme from a Course, the booking and invoicing process will no longer look at the Course Template to see if there is a Price Scheme there. Only Price Schemes assigned to the Course will be used to calculate alternative costs for your customers.

If you would like to learn more about Price Schemes, please take a look at our dedicated Price Schemes guide.

Accessibility Updates

There are two accessibility changes included in this latest update!

The first of these changes is within the Booker & Delegate selection options within the Checkout Basket.

It is now possible to tab to the red 'X' buttons displayed to the right of the Booker and Delegate names. These buttons are used to clear the selected Booker or Delegate so that a different user can be selected instead.

This change means that keyboard-only users, including those who have trouble with using a mouse due to mobility issues and those who navigate the web using a screen-reader, can now access these buttons.

The second accessibility change is within the Learner Portal. The logo displayed at the top-left of all the Learner Portal pages is not only used for branding, it is also a link back to the homepage of the Learner Portal.

To make sure that users of screen-reader software have a clear understanding of the images they encounter and the destinations of clickable links, it's important to offer descriptive alternative text that accurately describes their contents and the destination!

We have now updated this image to always have the alt text of ‘My Learning Homepage’ to inform screen-reader users that they will be taken back to the homepage if they click on the image.

🤗 If you would like any support with any of the new features or changes please get in touch with our Customer Support Team.

🤔 If you have any ideas of how we can improve the product further, please log these on our Product Portal.

Finally, if you would like to be a part of our product development process, you can join our Product Loop Club! Read more about our Loop Club.